US military strikes boat in Pacific in apparent expansion of campaign against alleged drug trafficking

By Natasha Bertrand, CNN

(CNN) — The US military conducted a lethal strike against a boat in the eastern Pacific on Tuesday, killing both people on board, according to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.

The strike on the vessel in the Pacific, the 8th known strike by the US military on an alleged drug-smuggling vessel since the start of September, appears to mark an expansion of the US military campaign, with all seven previous strikes targeting boats in the Caribbean Sea.

At least 34 people in total have been killed in the eight strikes, officials have said.

“Narco-terrorists intending to bring poison to our shores, will find no safe harbor anywhere in our hemisphere,” Hegseth said on X Wednesday.

Hegseth said the boat targeted in the Pacific was “being operated by a Designated Terrorist Organization and conducting narco-trafficking in the Eastern Pacific” and “was known by our intelligence to be involved in illicit narcotics smuggling, was transiting along a known narco-trafficking transit route, and carrying narcotics.”

The secretary added that no US forces were hurt in the strike and compared the traffickers to al Qaeda.

“Just as Al Qaeda waged war on our homeland, these cartels are waging war on our border and our people. There will be no refuge or forgiveness—only justice,” he wrote.

The Trump administration has produced a classified legal opinion seeking to justify lethal strikes against a secret and expansive list of cartels and suspected drug traffickers, CNN has reported.

The opinion is significant, legal experts previously told CNN, because it treats drug traffickers as enemy combatants who can be summarily killed without any kind of judicial review.

The US struck at least two other vessels last week in the Caribbean, one of which did not kill everyone on board. Rather than hold two survivors detained by the US Navy after one of those strikes, the US repatriated the survivors back to their home countries of Ecuador and Colombia.

The situation was potentially going to set up a legal and policy dilemma for the administration because it was unclear what legal authority the US military would be able to cite to detain them indefinitely.

This is a developing story and will be updated

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